It’s Brand’s hypocrisy that really makes my blood boil

If I’d been eating popcorn while watching Question Time last week I think most of it would have been thrown at the television in sheer disgust.

Where do I even begin writing about it?

The programme put UKIP’s Nigel Farage and ‘revolutionary’ comedian Russell Brand in a room together

The first topic, for those who didn’t see it, was whether the petty, adversarial nature of politics is causing its own demise.

Well, from that point on the programme became a bun fight of the type usually seen in the playground.

That’s when the first handful of popcorn would have been thrown at the telly, had I been eating any.

It’s not that I don’t think Brand, comedian and self-styled revolutionary, has a point.

And it’s not that I think only politicians should appear on the programme.

What I fundamentally disagree with is someone who wrote a book called Revolution, styles himself after that T-shirt print of Che Guevara, who refuses to vote, stands in corporate boxes at the football and has a film about how bankers should be vilified part-paid for by…wait for it…hedge fund bankers.

In short, it’s the hypocrisy that makes my blood boil.

He says he doesn’t vote because there’s no-one to vote for, and he’s with the 70-odd per cent of this country who decided not to go to the polls in this year’s Euro elections.

But there he is, sitting downwind from his bete noir — an MEP thanks to that 70-odd per cent.

That’s when my second handful of popcorn would have been launched telly-wards.

Someone from the audience demanded to know why, if he wanted to shake this country’s political systems up, he didn’t stand as an MP.

He said he didn’t want to become ‘one of them’ meaning, presumably, Mary Creagh and Portsmouth North MP Penny Mordaunt, who were also on the Question Time panel .

By this point the popcorn bowl would have been empty and I, for one, certainly wasn’t laughing at what this comedian had to say.